“Often when men come to the monastery they’re very enthusiastic, often God will grant them spiritual comfort and consolation in prayer in order to attract them to Himself and oftentimes after a while in the monastery that seems to go away and they begin to experience dryness in prayer and emptiness and hard-heartedness; they feel abandoned by God. But the monastic fathers actually tell us that God does indeed grant us special graces at certain times and reveals something of Himself in a more tangible way that’s very pleasing to us and comforts us but that comfort isn’t for all the time. The real spiritual growth takes place when He does not grant us those special graces; real spiritual growth takes place when our prayer is dry, when it’s difficult to stand through the Church services, when we fall asleep during our spiritual reading, when we can’t keep our mind focussed in our cell rule or when we’re praying in Church. This process that goes on during the long monastic Church services is very much a part of our life; if we had nothing but consolation all the time we really wouldn’t grow, in fact we’d grow weaker. Prayer, whether it’s in the cell or whether it’s in the Church, is a great time of struggling with himself and with his own thoughts and his own desires or with the demons attacking him and suggesting things to him; his own flesh being tired and worn out or wanting to go to sleep; if we persevere and we say to ourself ‘No matter what, I am going to continue to pray, I’m going to continue to struggle; no matter how difficult it is, no matter how many times I fall I’m gonna just keep getting up’ this is what changes us, this is what transforms us.”

(One of the senior monks, Hermitage of the Holy Cross, West Virginnia)
(From the Little Mountain –Reflections on Orthodox Christian Monasticism, DVD, 2008)